There are quite a few throwaway accounts in this thread claiming to be Facebook employees, arguing different sides of the issue. They can't all be PR. In my experience—and we can confirm this in some cases—people are mostly who they say they are.

Of course manipulation is possible, and bad, but so are insinuations of manipulation without evidence, and the latter are (by every indication I've seen) orders of magnitude more common. That's why the site guidelines ask you not to post like this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

In the long run, if manipulation ends up dominating forums like HN, the only real solution is to do what we ought to all be doing anyway: have a culture in which arguments are answered by better arguments. Since that's the only long-term immunity, we might as well develop it now.

Sorry, I was concerned, and didn't intend to violate the guidelines.

Hopefully, a marketplace of ideas will be sufficient in practice here.

Appreciated!

While using throwaway account doesn't necessarily mean the comment is manipulation, I personally have an issue with unsubstantiated comments from anonymous poster with no credible past history on HN.

If I am to take the comment I need something that would give some credibility to it, like having some way to verify the claims or if that is not possible, have a real person that puts their word behind the claim.

There is a reason why it is not possible for anonymous witness to testify in court and the reason is that anonymous person can say whatever they want with no responsibility for their words. It is exactly that responsibility and accountability that gives credibility to the witness.

No question it's suboptimal, but the alternatives have problems too. It's not hard to understand why a legit user would choose to post that way. I can tell you from many years of experience with this that most people turn out to be who they say they are, and readers tend to be off by 10x or more in guessing about this. That may change, but I don't think we're seeing indications of that yet.

I don't agree, and the reason is that posting unsubstantiated, unverifiable claims, anonymously, on a serious topic is tantamount to spreading rumors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumor).

The damaging power of rumor comes from the fact that you can't tell whether the information is true or not, but you pass it anyway. The act of passing the rumor is already causing damage even if you don't act on the information in any other way.

For you this might seem innocuous but many people have been completely broken by a simple rumor and that's why I have always been taught that spreading or allowing to spread rumors is always a bad thing to do.

Often people want to post something about the situation at their job, and they're afraid to do so with their regular account. Such comments contain real information based on inside knowledge, the kind that HN readers love to get access to. That's the opposite of rumors. Indeed those comments frequently contain more and better information than would ever appear under the regular account.

It's also true that such comments can be counterfeited, which is where this gets complicated. But HN would be worse off without that class of comments. It's a legit use for throwaway accounts.

Are they verifiable? I don't think that's the best standard to apply to internet comments. The vast majority aren't. You have to assess credibility, but I wouldn't call that verification. In the case of a throwaway account, the only public information for assessing credibility is the content of the comments themselves, but that's not all that different from the usual situation on the internet. Admins have it a bit easier because there is other data we can also look at.

If I were a facebook employee commenting on this I certainly wouldn’t use my main account.

Which is part of why this seems a hard problem: how do we distinguish the sincere and informative comments from the insincere and manipulative, in the short window it matters most?

If we can't, then can we proactively discourage bad actors a different way? Or somehow sufficiently right harm done and unjust advantage taken, after the fact?

You can have an alt account where you build a reputation but do not divulge personal information.

That way if you got something important to say there is a backstory to verify.

Of course this can be gamed and personas can be built as a weapon for future conflicts but at least the option is available for me and you to communicate with some credibility without opening us up to offline attacks. (I was originally writing IRL, but online is Real Life IMO, it is just that some parts of my online life doesn't point back a single identity.)

There are a number of people here who run two accounts, like me. It is mostly a good thing IMO and totally OK with the mods as long as the alt accounts follow the rules and doesn't change too often. This is my third in a decade or so I think.